In the flooring industry, a wide variety of flooring products are available including, for example, hardwood, bamboo, laminate, and luxury vinyl tile. Luxury vinyl tile typically includes a base layer or core that is formed from a polyvinyl chloride (PVC) material. A decorative layer is applied to the core using a thermofusing process to adhere the decorative layer to the core with a hot melt adhesive. The thermofusing process requires that the core be heated to a temperature of about 350 degrees Fahrenheit or greater to soften the PVC material and hot melt adhesive sufficiently to adhere the decorative later to the core. The heat required to adhere the materials of the core and the decorative layer can cause surface defects or variations in the thickness of the materials, which is often referred to as potato-chipping.
Additionally, forming the decorative layer is a time consuming and expensive process that includes embossing decorative patterns into the decorative layer using an embossing cylinder. The cylinder applies material to a sheet product that is typically 4 feet by 8 feet. As a result, the cylinder is made of sufficient width and diameter to apply a pattern on each sheet through a single revolution. For complex patterns, multiple cylinders are used to layer the embossings to form the desired pattern. Machining one or more cylinders to emboss a pattern on a decorative layer is expensive and requires significant time. To justify the time and cost involved in forming the cylinder requires a significant quantity of product to be produced. This creates a challenge when manufacturing flooring because the popularity of a pattern is subject to present consumer demand, and trends in the market. Often, large quantities of material that contain unpopular or outdated patterns are sold below cost or scrapped resulting in considerable waste.
Therefore, there is a need for a flooring component and a process for forming the flooring component that provides greater design flexibility by removing the need for an embossing cylinder.
The foregoing background discussion is intended solely to aid the reader. It is not intended to limit the innovations described herein. Thus, the foregoing discussion should not be taken to indicate that any particular element of a prior system is unsuitable for use with the innovations described herein, nor is it intended to indicate that any element is essential in implementing the innovations described herein. The implementations and application of the innovations described herein are defined by the appended claims.